Continuous Security Through IAM Hygiene

If you lead engineering, security, or platform teams in fast-moving cloud environments, you have felt this problem: you need to move quickly, but you cannot confidently answer who has access to what right now without a manual scramble.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is not hard because the concepts are complicated. It is hard because the environment changes constantly. People join and leave. Service accounts accumulate. Permissions get granted “temporarily.” New projects appear overnight. By the time you finish an audit, the ground has shifted.

That drift is one of the most persistent sources of cloud security risk. In multi-cloud environments it shows up as missing MFA, dormant identities, overly broad permissions, and broken access controls that stay invisible until an incident forces the issue.

The fix is not to slow delivery or chase perfect centralization. The fix is continuous, automated governance using Policy as Code that you can version-control and run across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

The Strategy: Detect, Then Enforce

The fastest way to lose trust is to start with strict enforcement everywhere. It breaks production and turns security into a blocker.

Instead, adopt a maturity model that builds organizational trust in stages:

Detect → Notify → Remediate (Manual) → Automate

Start by flagging high-risk artifacts (e.g., access keys older than 90 days). Gain visibility first. Next, automate notifications to the owners. Then, introduce a manual remediation step. Only once the logic is battle-tested should you enable fully automated remediation triggered by real-time events like CloudTrail logs.

High-Impact Areas to Tackle First

• ‍Missing MFA: Find accounts that can sign in without multi-factor authentication (AWS account level, Azure Entra ID tenant level).‍
• Orphaned Identities: Identify unused AWS roles and aging GCP service account keys. These are the "ghost" access paths that attackers exploit because no one is watching them.‍
• Overly Permissive Access: Flag high-severity risks, such as policies granting "allow all" or Azure roles with broad subscription ownership.‍
• Testable Compliance: Map abstract requirements (like NIST SP 800-53) into concrete, actionable benchmarks you can run daily, not quarterly.

Tools like Cloud Custodian let you define guardrails in a vendor-neutral way. You can write a policy once and run it across AWS, Azure, and GCP, without tying your compliance logic to a single provider.

Watch the Presentation

You don't solve IAM chaos overnight. You build a system that keeps cleaning up as the environment changes. I walked through these ideas at Governance As Code Day with Cloud Custodian (hosted by Stacklet) in the below talk.

If IAM drift is slowing audits or increasing incident risk, we can help you implement Policy as Code guardrails safely, starting with detection. Contact us.